Jawhari Zaki — architect, founder of the Urbandrone practice

Jawhari Zaki is an unconventional architect. Since 2007 his research has followed one question — how urban space is perceived through the senses — and it has taken him from buildings to light, sound and code. Almost two decades of practice in augmented and interactive scenography have grown out of it.

In 2009 he joined the Digital Slaves collective and led its architectural projection-mapping division for five years, producing very large-scale mappings on urban sites and interactive installations for public space.

In 2015 he founded Urbandrone, a practice and lab for digital engineering that builds hybrid systems out of multimedia technology, connected objects and virtual reality. Each project is a pretext to question how digital technologies change the ways a city is used and appropriated.

The same question runs through the artwork. Since 2021 the pieces are minted on Tezos — collections such as STASIS, Diatoms, TransFormation and Time of Flight, and single works on hic et nunc and Versum — each a study of one process, flow, growth or light, pushed until it produces an object worth keeping: architecture fiction, followed into motion, sound and interaction.

The studio also builds its own instruments and shares them: ArtLux, a GPU pixel-mapping and spatial-audio console for LED and projection installations, and Plotter3D, which turns 3D scenes into pen-plotter drawings. Teaching runs in parallel, with bilingual course manuals on 3D visualisation and AI-generated narratives written for design students in Nantes.